the open source diagnostics platform of the web

Tag Archives: PRG

Ironically, we have had this release pretty much ready to go now for over a month. But we have both been busy working on some major work which will get us out of beta and into 1.0. Until that happens thought, this release is ready to go and we have some really cool new features to share!

Timeline Support

This is a huge feature for us and where we spent a significant chunk of time. Basically we had the realization that as a side effect of the inspection we are doing, we had a heap of timing information available to us. The question then was how to best show this timing information.

We tossed and turned on this one for a while, and with a little inspiration from how tools like FireBug solve this problem, we finally settled on having an interactive timeline to show the data.

Additionally, we provide a table view for those who would prefer the data in that fashion.

Lastly, I am happy to announce that along with this we allow you to add your own data to the timeline. This will not only be useful for your own applications, but for plugin authors. Given the way that the Timing API has been added into Glimpse, any plugin can submit data and it will show up in the timeline. Here is an example of what it looks like:

More samples and details will come soon. If anyone has any feedback make sure you let us know.

CALL TO ACTION:

We want to make the information we show as useful as possible. What we are showing in this release is just what we think people are interested in seeing. Hence if you have any ideas, reach out to us or hop on the dev list.

PRG Support

As defined by Wikipedia, PRG is “Post/Redirect/Get (PRG) is a common design pattern for web developers to help avoid certain duplicate form submissions and allow user agents to behave more intuitively with bookmarks and the refresh button.”

This is important, as when a PRG occurs, the majority of interesting data (as far as Glimpse is concerned) is associated with the original “post” and hence is missing from the redirected “get” that the developer sees in Glimpse after the PRG.

This was always possible with Glimpse, but the UX experience was not good. Knowing that a PRG had occurred, one would have to go to the Remote tab, find the session and then selected or the appropriate result set.

Now, Glimpse can automatically detect the PRG pattern, and will display the URI as a dropdown allowing you to easily switch contexts between the original POST and the resultant GET.

IP Range Support

We took on a great pull request from rho24 (aka Richard Oliver) which has added the long requested IP Range support for Glimpse. This support has taken the form of CIDR Notation. To enable this within your system, simply add this following to your Glimpse config:

In this case, it would allow all IP’s from 127.0.0.0 – 127.0.0.255. Hopefully this will allow for a lot more flexibility when it comes to setting up Glimpse on any remote servers.

New Glimpse.EF Package

Just look at this screen shot, need we say more?

WARNING: This new Glimpse plugin is highly experimental, is not yet complete and currently only supports EF 4.0 and 4.1. This adds support that we have wanted from day 1 but has taken some time to get out the door. We would love it if you would give it a try and let us know if you have any trouble or find any bugs.

You can download and add Glimpse.EF to your project as usual via Nuget.

That’s it!

Wow that seems like a lot! But hopefully it has been worth the wait and we have some more existing stuff coming in the next release. We hope that if all goes well here, our next release will be a Release Candidate build!